Article Link: http://exchangepress.com/article/laughter-and-humor--not-just-kids-stuff/5021046/
“The most wasted day of all is that on which we have not laughed.”Nicolas Chamfort, French playwright, 1741-1794
At the beginning of dinner at the home of friends recently, five-year-old Sophie looked at me and said with a grin, “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, ten.” Knowing the joke, I asked with gusto, “What happened to nine?” Triumphantly, she answered, “Seven ate nine.” There was laughter all around the table, except from her four-year-old sister. Having studied humor for 35 years, I knew that most children don’t get jokes based on homonyms (words that sound alike) until they’re about seven, so I wanted to congratulate my friends on their daughter’s precociousness.
But then I remembered the ‘false-positive’ my own son Jordan showed at age four, in a test I devised to see if he could understand humor based on homonyms. His best friends at preschool were Ben and Jamie, so I had prepared a knock-knock joke playing with the sound of “Ben.”
“Knock knock,” I said.
“Who’s there?” he replied.
“Ben,” I said.
“Ben who?” he asked.
“Ben to Chicago?” I said in a rising tone, watching to see if Jordan would laugh. He did �" heartily.
Then he said, “Dad, ...